”Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” United States President George Bush told the world after September 11 2001, and he has made it clear ever since that he means it. But in that black and white universe, where do you put Josh Rushing?
Rushing is a blue-eyed son of Texas, a marine for all his adult life whose clean-cut friendly charm made him the ideal public face for the US military during the Iraq invasion. But he has now joined the Arab television channel al-Jazeera as an ”on-screen personality”, a move which, in the eyes of many Americans, is one step short of signing up with al-Qaeda.
The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has accused the Qatar-based satellite channel of lying to the world and spouting terrorist propaganda. Its journalists have been boycotted by American officials and thrown out of Iraq. One of its reporters has recently been jailed for seven years by a Spanish court for collaborating with al-Qaeda.
In joining al-Jazeera’s forthcoming English-language service, Rushing points out that he is in good journalistic company. He will be surrounded by former BBC employees, including David Frost. But they are Europeans and journalists, two species generally associated with perfidy in the minds of the American right. Rushing is an American and a marine. For many conservatives here, he has joined a pantheon of turncoats alongside Benedict Arnold (who switched to the British side halfway through the war of independence) and ”Tokyo Rose” (who broadcast for the Japanese in World War II).
The conservative blogs hum with bile. The comments on freerepublic.com include: ”He was crap to begin with — he stinks even worse now. He is no longer an American”. Another writes: ”He is a leftist, terrorist sympathiser who infiltrated the US marines. Now he is home”. A third adds: ”I sure hope he don’t have some kinda accident or sumtin [sic] …”
There have been quite a few along the lines of that last remark, enough for the former marine captain to take a few security precautions at his new Washington home, and he admits to feeling the strain. ”It’s kind of hard for a guy who’s dedicated his entire adult life to the health and wellbeing of this country to be called a traitor by people who, I feel, have probably sacrificed a lot less than I have,” he said.
He was talking in an elegant and quiet corner of Washington’s Army and Navy Club, where he still enjoys privileges, despite his choice of employer.
He dresses in the manner of many former officers on both sides of the Atlantic — a tweed jacket over a boldly striped shirt — and has the crispness in his talk and the direct gaze drilled into him at marine charm school.
Those qualities, plus his degree in classic civilisations and ancient history, got him the job of presenting the Pentagon’s side of the Iraq war to the local media in Qatar’s capital, Doha. It made him an unwitting star. An Egyptian-American filmmaker, Jehane Noujaim, was hanging around the media centre with a video camera, and most of the officers, including the then Lieutenant Rushing, thought she was making a student film about media coverage of the war. But her documentary, Control Room, became one of last year’s surprise hits.
The film is a largely sympathetic portrayal of al-Jazeera, but it also shines a bright light on the multimillion-dollar publicity machine the Pentagon built in Doha. Among all the gung-ho on-message military information officers, Rushing stuck out. He listened to what some of the Arab journalists were saying about the war and appeared to reconsider some of his assumptions. In one memorable scene, he declared himself sickened by al-Jazeera’s decision to screen pictures of dead Americans, but then realised he was not as outraged to see Iraqi bodies on the same network the following evening.
”It upset me on a profound level that I wasn’t bothered as much as the night before,” he said in the film. ”It makes me hate war.”
The film caused an uproar, and abuse from military and militaristic types began to flood in. His favourite was: ”Six months in the desert doesn’t make you fucking Lawrence of Arabia.” Rushing recalls: ”I saved that one, because I don’t claim to be Lawrence of Arabia — just a guy who says it may be worth us trying to understand their perspective.”
Displaying an apparently genuine innocence, he still cannot understand why the defence department was annoyed by the film, and why he was subsequently forbidden to talk to the press. ”The Pentagon missed an opportunity with my case in that movie,” he says. ”I would have liked to have come out and said that there are a lot of people in the military that would have reacted in the same way in that film, trying to understand the other side and wanting to do the right thing.”
He left the marines last August and spent some miserable months, unemployed and eating into his modest savings, before he accepted al-Jazeera’s offer.
The danger Rushing now faces is that he may be accused of going from one one-sided media operation to another. After all, he is shown in Control Room criticising al-Jazeera’s bias, comparing it to Fox News ”at the other end of the spectrum”.
He admits that he is unaware whether al-Jazeera’s Arabic broadcasts have got any better. ”I don’t know where they’re at right now. I don’t get a chance to watch it, and if I could I don’t understand it,” he says. ”I think there’s going to be a difficult time overcoming the brand in America.”
It may turn out to be impossible. The new English-language al-Jazeera International has yet to find a US cable outlet prepared to carry its broadcasts. – Guardian Unlimited Â